Recommended software

Veedrock

Veedrock

Finally got my ducks in a row and I'm about ready to format my computer. I'm not happy with the current performance and I'm looking for lighter alternatives to common "bloatware" programs for when I restart. I'm aware of this previous thread in Internet Renaissance but it's really old so may be newer or better software out there.

I'm using Windows 7 64-bit. In bold are the types of programs I'm prioritizing, though I probably missed some so feel free to point them out!

Antivirus: I use Microsoft Security Essentials now and have been plenty happy with it, I'm just unsure how resource heavy it is though or if there's anything better out there.

Firewall: I'm not at all knowledgeable in this area, I currently just default to Windows Firewall. Need suggestions here unless you guys think Windows Firewall is acceptable.

Media Player: Like above I've been defaulting to Windows Media Player largely for convenience, I'm sure there's better programs out there. I just need basic music playback really, though some extra features and/or audio settings would be great.

Office Programs: I don't want to pay for Microsoft Office so I need assistance here. While an obvious alternative would be Open Office, I've also been reading about Kingsoft Office Suite which seems to be exactly what I want with a smaller size and more familiar look. Anybody have experience with it?

PDF Viewer: I don't think I need suggestions on this, but figured I'd list it anyways just in case. While I would just default to Adobe before, I didn't use five-quarters of its features so to lighten my load I'm going to use Sumatra PDF.

Misc: In addition to utility program suggestions, I'm looking for other miscellaneous "must have" programs. Those I have off the top of my head are:
  • mIRC
  • Notepad++
  • Rainmeter
  • Skype
  • Steam
I'll cut it off there, and keep this post updated with programs that have been suggested.
 
VLC for media players is terrific for me, very user friendly, runs mp4, avi, possibly mkv, overall better experience than windoes media imo
 
Veedrock said:
Antivirus: I use Microsoft Security Essentials now and have been plenty happy with it, I'm just unsure how resource heavy it is though or if there's anything better out there.
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don't forget malwarebytes and spybot search+destroy

Veedrock said:
Misc: In addition to utility program suggestions, I'm looking for other miscellaneous "must have" programs. Those I have off the top of my head are:
  • mIRC
  • Notepad++
  • Rainmeter
  • Skype
  • Steam
Click to expand...


soluto cloud-based software that allows you to remotely see details of other people's computer. more of a tech-support kind of tool, let's you pinpoint problems/suggest improvements for users

and cloverleaf mentioned VLC already for video playback

for audio editing/recordingI recommend audacity

for adjusting monitor colour display I suggest f.lux (good for using computer at night!)
 
CCleaner is great for cleaning up your computer/apps that you use.

Defraggler is much better than Windows Defragmenter because you can choose individual files/drives to defragment.

I personally use Speccy to see how hot my computer is for curiosity sake but it gives you your computer's specs.

LibreOffice is made by the same people as OpenOffice when they left because the people at OpenOffice different in viewpoints. It's kept more up to date than OpenOffice.

SuperAntiSpyware is a great antispyware program and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware has saved my other computer several times.

Whatpulse is fun if you like to track your keystrokes.

last.fm to tell the world what type of music you listen to and also keeps numbers of times played. Works with iTunes, Spotify, and should work with Media Player though I don't have that one set up on my comp.
 
Media: VLC/(Media Monkey, MPD)
Documents: Microsoft Office/Libre Office
Feature-full Text Editor: Notepad ++/ Sublime
 
Texas Cloverleaf said:
VLC for media players is terrific for me, very user friendly, runs mp4, avi, possibly mkv, overall better experience than windoes media imo
Click to expand...

Don't use VLC to watch movies / tv shows. Media Player Classic - Home Cinema is this best video watcher. It is lag free, easily customizable, and can handle 1080p movies, something which my VLC seemed to struggle with.

EDIT:

Foobar is really good, it takes a while to get used to but once you get it nothing beats it.
Calibre is the ultimate in ebooks on your computer, don't know how big you are on those.
uTorrent is a must as well.
 
VLC vs MPC-HC is something that's discussed a lot, but unless your computer's specs suck or you have specialized needs, VLC does the job fine. The anime community has been complaining about VLC's subpar MKV playback support for years but frankly none of their complaints have applied since VLC 2.0.x. Sub support is as good as MPC-HC now that libass (the ssa subtitle playback library) is incorporated into VLC, and MKV ordered chapter/folder preloading support was added very recently. VLC can also handle 10-bit playback just fine which is an up and coming thing in fansubbing. I don't see any concrete advantages MPC-HC has over VLC right now, although its longer history tends to give it an advantage in anime forums. If you ARE going to get MPC-HC, download the customized version through cccp (http://cccp-project.net/), not the one from SF. Frankly, if you have difficulty playing back high-quality video, the problem is your hardware, not your player selection, and the only way to get around that is to start installing more complex playback chains (there are a lot of bits and pieces involved in decoding audio, video and subs - changing the pieces will of course adjust your performance but it gets MUCH more complicated very very fast).

MSE > avast by far. also, spybot s&d is washed up. malwarebytes antimalware and superantispyware are both established free competitors but they're crippled without paid features (they can't perform scheduled scans) so I would not recommend them as a primary antivirus scan service. I have them both, but I only use them every once in a while to do additional scans. In general it is a mistake to run more than one primary antivirus program.

windows firewall tends to be sufficient for most people but be advised that its ability to block outgoing connections is cripplingly poor. If that's a concern for you, a third party firewall is strongly recommended. I'm experimenting with a notification system right now (windows firewall normally doesn't notify you if an outgoing connection is blocked, which is why that functionality is so gimped) but it's not great.

notepad++ is good enough for most non-programmers that need a better text editor than notepad. sublimetext and gvim would be my top recommendations if you need more than that, leaning towards gvim right now although a friend actually introduced sublime to me a few days ago and I cannot deny I was impressed

winrar and winzip are bs. all that crap is paid and it'll nag you forever. Just use 7zip. the interface may be a little lacking but the shell extension takes care of everything and it'll handle literally every archive format that you'll ever need to handle, including tarballs which windows is very bad at handling without the support of a truly advanced archive handler.

Libre > Open office > everything else except microsoft office itself, nuff said. Frankly I would use Libre unless I had particular features that I needed from Microsoft Office. Libre's compatibility with office's established formats is very high - sadly it's probably not quite perfect. In any case I'm still using msft office right now so there you go

for most uses paint.net is probably sufficient, the GIMP probably won't cut it anyway if you have serious graphic design work to do. still the GIMP is much more complete than paint.net. It's a matter of features vs bloat. I wouldn't call GIMP bloated at all, but if it's got stuff you don't tend to use, then it would be bloated from that perspective

sumatra is the best pdf reader I know of. Have experimented with nitro and foxit but neither was as good; sumatra is lighter and you really don't need much to read a PDF. Another nice thing is that sumatra has a PDF reader plugin for firefox and I believe it has one for chrome as well, which allows you to open PDFs in browser the same way adobe reader allows. I am fairly certain that nitro and foxit do not provide that functionality.

as for music playing, most people tend to prefer a more involved solution than VLC and I can frankly see why. VLC's library management system isn't as developed as most other options are. I use mediamonkey and I see no reason to switch right now but foobar2000 has been vouched for many times; i have no personal experience with it myself
 
Comodo Firewall is pretty good if you need a firewall, although it can be a bit annoying at times, asking you to confirm pretty much everything you do outside of the confines of your own PC. Still, the added security is (probably) worth it.
 
You really only want to use 1 antivirus/firewall? I'm running ComboFix, AVG 2012, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, System Mechanic. and Trend Micro Titanium. The last one isn't free and I'm not sure about the second to last but I would much rather have an extra 20MB occupied on my hard drive than a virus or worse
 
Zacchaeus said:
You really only want to use 1 antivirus/firewall? I'm running ComboFix, AVG 2012, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, System Mechanic. and Trend Micro Titanium. The last one isn't free and I'm not sure about the second to last but I would much rather have an extra 20MB occupied on my hard drive than a virus or worse
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My understanding is that running multiple antivirus programs can result in conflicts that significantly reduce the speed of your computer. I recall having to reformat my hard drive - the one Windows is loaded on - once because I could not get my computer to run because of having conflicting antivirus software.

Anyway, for the record, I currently use Avast! and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and have not had any problems with viruses and other forms of infections.
 
^ primary antivirus programs (the ones that perform heuristic scanning especially) tend to never get along well, especially the gigantic "internet security" suite stuff. same goes for running multiple firewalls, even more so if anything because they'll both try to take control of the port filters on your comp. that's almost always a mistake because they'll interfere with each other to no end. running extras on the side for the occasional extra scan shouldn't have much impact, but trying to run 2+ firewalls or active scanning antivirus progs at the same time is a bad bad idea.

EDIT: flashstorm ninja'd me
 
alkinesthetase said:
windows firewall tends to be sufficient for most people but be advised that its ability to block outgoing connections is cripplingly poor. If that's a concern for you, a third party firewall is strongly recommended. I'm experimenting with a notification system right now (windows firewall normally doesn't notify you if an outgoing connection is blocked, which is why that functionality is so gimped) but it's not great.
Click to expand...

Just going to point out that blocking outgoing connections is almost unnecessary, and certainly not a crippling fault should it not be very good. If malware finds its way onto your computer, an outgoing firewall is still not preventing the malware from sending personal data away -- the malware has already gotten access to your computer; it can just add an exception to the firewall and send the data. So yeah, Windows Firewall should be sufficient.

I actually use MusicBee because I can't be bothered to customize f2k, and I don't have a huge collection that I need to organize with mediamonkey or something. And also iTunes sucks ass on Windows.

For irc I use hexchat, which is exactly the same thing as X-Chat but free. (Beats me how they are able to sell X-Chat for any money at all when it's open source >.>)

I agree with SumatraPDF and Notepad++ as well. I also use VLC for videos but if you download the right codecs then windows media player can actually be a legit media app. edit: lol, people are using VLC for music playing? hahaha. that's not a music library application at all.

I keep Malwarebytes on a flash drive when there's a bad virus that MSE didn't catch (which is really, really, rare) but I uninstall it afterwards as I don't pay for it, lol.

LibreOffice is great, I was going to use Intel's Lotus Symphony but you can get old waiting for it to load lol.

If you're going to use Rainmeter, you might as well use Fences to keep all of desktop icon crap off your desktop.

If you use POP3 or IMAP email you can use Thunderbird as well.

This is probably not relevant to a new computer (except for cleaning out the crapware that comes with Windows when you factory restore a prebuilt comp), but I was cleaning up a lot of crap off an old computer and Iobit Uninstaller came in really handy; instead of uninstalling programs one by one you can check boxes and batch uninstall a lot of them at once.

That's pretty much all I'm running off the top of my head; I just set up a new computer so it's pretty fresh. If someone posts some other neat software I'd definitely be interested.

edit: Oh. I forgot one thing: AutoHotKey. It's pretty neat, as you can use it to map shortcuts for basically anything using its scripting language. Not so much of a program to run as a utility for making using your computer more streamlined, but it's definitely something to check out if you get the chance.
 
supermarth64 said:
LibreOffice is made by the same people as OpenOffice when they left because the people at OpenOffice different in viewpoints. It's kept more up to date than OpenOffice.
Click to expand...

uh, yeah. openoffice.org has been obsolete since 2010. i recommend libreoffice.

but, if you are looking for something truly lighter, gnome office is a set of individual programs that trend toward minimalism.

symphonyx64 said:
Google Chrome
Click to expand...

google chrome has been obsolete since its inception -- chromium is superior in virtually every way.

with that in mind, chromium is not a 'lightweight' program either. opera and firefox both have a smaller installation size and use fewer resources (in general) (also they're less retarded). lighter browsers would include konqueror, flock, and epiphany, but i don't know the status of those browsers for windows.

also, you should definitely have a backup browser configured to use tor. protect your identity and whatnot.

cygwin provides a unix-like environment for windows. i've used it quite a bit at school and it's far more powerful than the default windows shell.

if you're reformatting your hdd anyway, now might be a good time to consider a non-windows os. just a suggestion...
 
puush is the single best thing in the world. Its a screenprint without having to use paint and it automatically uploads it for you. you literally get screenprints in 3 seconds. You can also upload videos / music / whatnot.
 
Dropbox: retardedly useful, especially if you have a smartphone
ShareX: lets you take screenshots and upload instantly to the image hoster of your choice, incredibly dandy if you take a lot of screenshots cuz its a timesaver. retardedly customizeable and open source
always-on-top: why doesnt windows have this natively like Ubuntu? nice one-line script.
xchat-wdk: best IRC client, hands down
uTorrent: enough said.
LibreOffice: Office, for all (?) OSs, freeware.
7zip: better than winrar
imgburn: burn discs etc

everythin else's probably been already said.

edit: oh god why would anyone use VLC? just go download CCCP and it comes with MPC-HC ready to use.
 
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